By Emelie Rutherford
The Marine Corps’ top equipment buyer warned last week that as the defense budget shrinks there will be a collision in his service between buying new copies of existing equipment and building more advanced systems.
Brig. Gen. Michael Brogan, head of Marine Corps Systems Command (MARCORSYSCOM), said that in the current austere economic environment recapitalization and modernization of equipment–the command’s historic mission–has fallen to the bottom of its list of four overarching priorities. Higher on the list, he said, are supporting forward-deployed troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, growing the size of the Marine Corps, and resetting worn equipment.
“Recapitalization and modernization…(are) going to become increasingly difficult,” Brogan said last Thursday during a lunch address to Marine Corps Association in Springfield, Va. “As we forecast forward decreasing budgets, (a) smaller amount of resources, and compare the things that the Marine Corps needs, our investment accounts are going to be significantly pinched.”
Meanwhile, “significant numbers of equipment are going to be increased in the Marine Corps,” Brogan said, noting the increased use of vehicles now compared to during peacetime. This was the finding of a recent Marine Air-Ground Task Force table-of-equipment review run by Lt. Gen. George Flynn, the deputy commandant for combat development and integration and commander of Marine Corps Combat Development Command.
“So the desire to buy new, existing equipment is going to collide with the necessity of buying improved-capability equipment,” Brogan said. “There will be some tough choices ahead.”
Thus, he said, meetings of the Marine Requirements Oversight Council “will be busy places.”
“The commandant (of the Marine Corps, Gen. James Conway) will have to make some hard decisions,” he added.
Efforts that fit into current recapitalization-and-modernization plans include an advanced-combat helmet for which the Marine Corps submitted a presolicitation to industry on Feb. 25, and a developmental infantry-automatic rifle for which three companies are competing, he said.
The defense industry is bracing for cuts to high-profile weapons programs when the Obama administration unveils in April the details of its proposed $533.7 billion based defense budget for fiscal year 2010 (Defense Daily, Feb. 27).
Defense Secretary Robert Gates has said the FY ’10 budget “must make hard choices,” but not across-the-board adjustments (Defense Daily, Jan. 28).
Brogan told reporters last Thursday he agrees the type of targeted cuts Gates described will be necessary.
“As the budget goes down, folks will have to decide, ‘Can we afford everything that’s in the current program, or do we need to cancel some things?'” Brogan said. “We need to prioritize, and then (ask) how do we enact those priorities. We can’t keep salami slicing,…taking 2 percent, 3 percent, 10 percent out of every program, because then we damage them all. We need to pick which ones are most important to us, fully fund them, and get them.”
The MARCORSYSCOM commander made clear during his speech that he doesn’t believe funding should be slashed for the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle (EFV). Brogan earlier in his career was the program manager for developmental vehicle previously called the Advanced Amphibious Assault Vehicle.
After the EFV suffered cost overruns, schedule delays and reliability challenges during testing, General Dynamics [GD] now is building seven redesigned prototypes of the amphibious vehicle.
“What EFV needs is the time to finish building these seven system-development-and-design prototypes, and put them into testing to demonstrate that the reliability models and their predictions are in fact accurate,” Brogan said. “We need to get those vehicles, shake them out, and then make a decision on whether or not to go to production.”
He argued the nation needs the forcible-entry capability provided by the EFV, an upgrade of the aging Amphibious Assault Vehicle, and said canceling the EFV effort would save only a “relatively small” amount of money.